So this is 39.

Today is my 39th birthday. It honestly doesn’t feel any different from any other day.

There are different types of birthday people. There’s the “IT’S MY BIRTHDAY AND I’M READY TO PAAAARTY!”-people. Some people celebrate their birthdays all month long. On the other end of the spectrum, there are the “Please don’t make a big deal out of my birthday!”-people. Then there are the “Please don’t make a big deal out of my birthday!” except they actuallyreallyDO want you to make a big deal out of their birthday-people.

I am definitely in the “please don’t make a big deal out of my birthday” camp. I don’t need the fanfare. But it did kind of get me thinking…

Shouldn’t I be more excited? Next year is the big 4-0 but I don’t really care about getting older. I don’t feel like I’m getting older. I mean, I’m tired and parts of me hurt a lot, but I figure some of that can be blamed on chasing after the kid all day and then taking grad school classes at night and generally just overdoing it.

I don’t know. I guess I feel like I should have more emotion (excitement? pride? nostalgia? happiness? fear of impending old age? total devastation?) about reaching a milestone like a birthday that ends in zero. Milestone birthdays deserve big celebration and hullabaloo, right? (God, I must be getting old if I’m voluntarily using a word like hullabaloo.)

So I sat down a couple weeks ago and tried to come up with a list of 40 things that I wanted to accomplish over the next year to commemorate turning 40. I didn’t get very far. In fact, my list was so lame, that before I even got to 10, I deleted it.

I know some people do stuff like this and would write “RUN A MARATHON” or “HIKE THE PACIFIC CREST TRAIL” or whatever, but I just don’t have any of that in me.

My list:

Publish books 5 & 6

Summer residency at Harvard

Start thesis

Trip to Napa

Summer home exchange

Exercise regularly

Lose 15-20 pounds

The problem with my list is that it’s mostly all stuff I’m planning on doing anyway. I mean, the exercising and weight loss, I’m working on. Books 5 and 6 are already done; I just have to figure out what to do with them. The summer residency at Harvard has to/will happen, and after that, yeah, I plan on starting my thesis.

While some stuff is kind of obvious and is already in the works, I worry that I don’t really know what I want to do after I get done with school. I worry that I’m 39 and I don’t have things figured out. And I worried for a bit that my lame-ass attempt at a list means that I’m boring, but I just couldn’t think of one damn thing to add to the list that I really, really, want to do in the next year… because right now, I’m already doing everything I want to do! I’m pretty happy with everything that I’ve got going on in my life… even if I’m not sure where I’m going or what I’m doing. It’s still a pretty bad-ass feeling.